Maldives sets a three-day deadline for issuing a tax invoice or receipt

What changed in detail

The Eighth Amendment to the Goods and Services Tax Act (Law Number 10/2011), Law No. 10/2026, was passed on 26 August 2026 and published in the Government Gazette on ratification by the President on 31 August 2026. Clause 31 commences the Act on that publication date, so the invoicing rule below has applied since then.

Clause 13 inserts three new subsections after section 17(c) of the GST Act.

Section 17(d) requires a registered person to issue a tax invoice or receipt within three days of, for all goods supplied: the date the goods are removed from the place of supply; or, where they are not removed, the date they are made available to the recipient. Section 17(e) applies the same three-day limit to all services supplied, running from the date the services are completed.

Section 17(f) makes the deadline self-executing. Where no invoice or receipt is issued within the period set by subsection (d) or (e), then for the purposes of determining the time of supply under section 17, one is deemed issued on the date that period expires.

The obligation is expressed across all goods and all services of a registered person, with no threshold, sector or document-type exception in the inserted text.

What it means

Before this, late invoicing mostly deferred the tax point. Section 17(f) removes that: the time of supply now moves whether or not the paperwork does, so a document issued on day ten can land in an earlier taxable period than the date printed on it. The practical failure mode is not a penalty — it is a return that omits supplies MIRA considers already taxable.

Three days is short enough that it is a systems constraint rather than a policy one. Month-end consolidated billing, progress invoicing agreed in a contract, and any approval workflow that sits between service completion and invoice release are all now capable of breaching it while the business believes it is compliant. The controls worth having are a report of supplies with no document within three days, and a check that “completion of services” is a date the system actually records — for many service businesses it is not captured anywhere.